Robert Gates is Not a Hippie

NEWPORT, Rhode Island – Listen to critics of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and you’d think the 43-year veteran of the CIA and the military was some kind of closet pacifist. That the guy who George W. Bush appointed to run the Pentagon was, in fact, an undercover hippie, executing Barack Obama’s devious plan to draw down the military, and stick flowers in every gun barrel.

Former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne says Gates’ plan to radically overhaul the Pentagon’s arsenal is just an attempt by a "weary Defense Department to limit our sovereign options in the foggy future, by postulating ‘Peace in our Time.’" American Enterprise Institute military analyst Tom Donnelly says Gates’ talk about focusing on guerrilla conflicts instead of superpower showdowns is a fig leaf for unilateral disarmament. "It’s increasingly clear that, given the large-scale cutbacks directed by President Obama, Gates’ rhetoric is becoming an excuse for budget cuts rather than an argument about the nature of the threats we face," he writes at the Weekly Standard.

But the guy who lectured over the last two days, at the Army and Naval War Colleges, didn’t sound much like a peacenik. The Defense Secretary is trying to cut a wide swath of weapons programs, true. But the money from those projects, by in large, will stay in the Pentagon’s coffers, under Gates’ plan – for other weapons. Not only is Gates proposing to increase the Pentagon’s budget for 2010, by four percent more than this year’s total. He doesn’t want to see a major military cut back, even after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over.

After his prepared remarks, Gates was asked what lessons he had drawn from history. His response less than Gandhi-esque. One of America’s big failures after World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, was "dismantling both our military and intelligence capabilities," Gates said. "Every time we’ve come to the end of a conflict, somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the nature of mankind, and the nature of the world, has changed on an enduring basis."

"My hope is that as we wind down in Iraq – and whatever the level of commitment in Afghanistan – that we not forget the basic nature of humankind has not changed," he added. "We cannot disarm as we begin to see these conflicts we’re in today wind down."